Maybe It Was Always Like This.

It's just worse now.

Axel Bueckert

It was the night before my friend’s wedding.

My mom fell, again.

She lost control of her bowels. My brother and I cleaned up the mess while my dad slept upstairs, exhausted from work.

The next day, I showed up with a date and smiled through the ceremony. My friend was a disability rights attorney, and she couldn’t do anything to help me. But that day, we didn’t talk about my problems.

We almost never talked about my problems.

I was the quiet one.

My friend talked about her job a lot, and I listened.

Everyone else’s problems always sounded so much worse and more serious than what my family was going through. Besides, you know how it goes when you try to talk about anything serious with your friends.

They tune out.

Sometimes I forget that the denial, complacency, and wishful thinking that pervades society now has been there my entire life.

In some ways, it was always like this.

One time, in high school, I told a friend part of what I was going through. He told me I should run away. That’s it. Just run away.

It was a short conversation.

Halfway through college, some of my closest friends coached me on the fine art of keeping my problems to myself. They pulled this move after weeks of sharing their own personal problems. Everyone wants you to talk about your problems to someone, as long as you do it to someone else.

My problems stretch back as far as I can remember, hiding from my mom when she started screaming and throwing things at me. She spent large chunks of the day ignoring me while she roamed the house, talking to herself as if someone were there in the room with her. When she wasn’t doing that, she sat in the kitchen, smoking. My mom thought I was overweight. She thought I was dumb. She paddled me for hanging out with “freaks.” She said my friends were stealing from us and pressured me to frisk them before they left the house.

It wasn’t long before I lost my friends.

Those were the good times.

By my teenage years, she was convinced I was an alien. She thought dinosaurs were real. She thought the CIA was spying on my dad. One time she said she was going to starve me to death. She tried to make bombs out of alarm clocks to blow us up. Once or twice, she tried to kill me with her bare hands.

The police didn’t do anything. Sometimes they said they couldn’t do anything. Other times, they admitted they just didn’t care.

Couldn’t we handle it ourselves?

When my mom’s mental illness bloomed into violent delusions and hallucinations, my uncles and grandparents came to stay with us.

They lasted barely 12 hours with her.

They said, “I can’t deal with this.”

They left.

All of this continued for decades. For some reason, my dad insisted on normal family vacations to the beach. He downplayed and minimized her mental illness. It was always a mistake. One time, in a shared hotel room, my mom took off all her clothes and climbed into bed with my brother.

She started touching him.

About once a year, it finally got so bad that police sent out a couple of patrol cars and an ambulance. The police officers were always aghast at what they found, and they looked at me with open-mouthed pity.

I hated it.

Around the age of 15, part of me realized this was the most help I was ever going to get from the world. Police would look at me with pity as they handcuffed my mom and dragged her into the back of an ambulance. For a fee, a hospital would make her disappear for two weeks and then drug her up to the point that she was harmless. It was always a temporary solution, destined to fail.

The hospital bills were always enormous.

Insurance never covered them.

My mom started splitting most of her time between the couch and the kitchen table, smoking, eating chocolate, and watching Fox News. Doctors filled up folders with diagnoses. They ran endless tests and never delivered the results. The medical bills almost bankrupted my dad. At some point, we found out my mom had managed to run up $40,000 in credit card bills, on top of spending my entire college fund. We never found out what happened to the money.

Because my dad worked all the time, my mom’s responsibilities became mine. I bought groceries. I cooked. I did laundry. I cleaned. I took my brother to school when he missed the bus. I helped him with his homework, when he let me. My dad came home and took over. Every night, my mom managed to become lucid just long enough to start an explosive argument.

In college, I worked at restaurants. I still lived at home. About halfway through my sophomore year, life became unbearable. I asked my friends if I could crash on their couch for a few nights while looking for an apartment.

They said no.

I was trying hard to pretend everything was fine. I was the treasurer for a campus organization. When I tried to quit, citing mental health issues, the president of the organization called me and said:

“What the f—k is wrong with you? Stop acting like a f—king whiny bitch and get your shit together. It’s embarrassing.”

A week later, I got mugged.

Something worse probably would’ve happened if a bartender hadn’t jumped outside and threatened to call the police. I tried to say thanks to him. He rolled his eyes and called me a moron for being out so late by myself.

“I just got off work,” I said.

He didn’t care.

You might think I’m making all of this up, but here’s the thing. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how smart, nice, or attractive you are. Some of us just don’t have the tools to fit in, and everyone can smell the weird on us.

A handful of things got me through all of that.

Good books. Long runs. Music. Work.

They helped.

In my 20s and 30s, I learned how to make friends the normal way. I learned how to dance. I learned how to flirt. I learned how to tell short, funny little stories. I learned how to listen to other people go on and on about their problems while keeping my trauma to myself. I endured endless dinner parties. When bad things happened to other people, I tried to be there.

When my mom died, I let everyone tell me how sorry they were and how much they loved their own moms or how much they missed their dead ones. I didn’t tell them we hadn’t spoken for five years before she died.

I’ve learned that I can’t trust most people. Of course, I didn’t need to trust most people to get through life, because our society isn’t built on trust. It’s built on transactions and negotiations that we navigate carefully.

Until recently, that was acceptable.

Now we’re starting to see the consequences of building a society based on transactions instead of trust. Even the thin illusion of trust we used to operate on is tattered now, and we’re being conditioned to shred what’s left in the pursuit of fleeting, shallow pleasures. If you’re lucky enough to have one person in your life you can trust, you see what a huge difference it makes. Imagine if we lived in a society where we could actually trust eight or nine people, instead of simply accommodating and conforming to each other’s preferences.

That would be a nice world.